Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923) and the admission of women to the Royal Society of London

Abstract A notable incident in the history of women and the Royal Society was the proposal in 1902 of the physicist, Hertha Ayrton, as a candidate for the Fellowship. Her certificate seems to have been the first in the history of the Society to be submitted in favour of a woman, and 41 years were to elapse before the next. In 1906 she received the Society’s Hughes medal, which is awarded annually for original discovery in the physical sciences, for her work on the electric arc, and on sand ripples, and she is still the only woman to have received this medal. Hertha Ayrton1-5 was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks, the third of eight children of a Jewish watchmaker and jeweller of Petworth, Sussex, who had emigrated from Poland to escape the pogroms. He died when she was seven, leaving his pregnant wife and seven children (six sons) in poverty. Mrs Marks held that women needed a better not worse education than men, because ‘women have the harder battle to fight in the world’. With some self-sacrifice she allowed the nine-year-old Sarah to go to London to live with her aunt Marion Hartog, who ran a school.